


By the Morning Star

by Jackie Thomas (Jackie_Thomas)



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Illness and possible death of canon character, M/M, Magic, Spoilers for Down among the Fearful and Ramblin Boy, Suicide (case), Takes place around series eight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-04
Updated: 2015-07-04
Packaged: 2018-04-07 15:58:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4269378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jackie_Thomas/pseuds/Jackie%20Thomas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Love is a binding force, by which another is joined to me and cherished by myself,” James says, completing the quote. “Aquinas.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	By the Morning Star

Waking with a start, James finds himself in the corridor where he fell awkwardly asleep not an hour ago. The hospital smell of disinfectant has settled into the back of his throat and his mind is a desert of twisting sand. His phone is buzzing in his pocket. It is Lizzie, there is a suspicious death at Carlyle College. 

He looks in on Lewis before he goes. He is not allowed into the room. No more than two visitors at one time is the price exacted for permitting anyone at all to stay overnight. But he can see there has been no change, Lewis is trapped in the same uneasy half-consciousness; his skin damp, his breathing fast. Laura shakes her head in confirmation and Lyn, talking quietly on her phone glances up. She must be speaking to her brother. She is telling him to come.

At Carlyle a porter directs him to a tower at the corner of one of the College’s quads. At the top of its winding staircase he finds a reading room with space enough for one person to work. The walls are panelled in cherry wood and a window with its lock forced lets in the sharp, autumn night. A cold, dry wind rattles the blinds and rifles through the pages of a book lying open on the table.

The deceased, a skinny, black haired student named Charlie, is lying across the table, his head on his outstretched arm as if he has fallen asleep at his studies. A knife is on floor at his feet, apparently having slipped from his other hand. There is blood from the gash on his arm, slick and shiny on the table and pooling on the worn wood floor. The body had been discovered by the porter, who broke into the room after being alerted on his rounds to the light on and the open window.

Lizzie Maddox and two uniformed officers interview witnesses and keep the curious at bay. SOCO dust for prints on doors and windows and the police photographer works steadily around the body and then the room. She takes a series of pictures of the book which, when the breeze dies down, settles open on two blood spotted pages.

When she has finished James takes his own picture of those pages and then picks up the book with gloved hands. ‘A Study in Magic and the Occult Sciences’, a thick foolscap volume bound in scuffed brown leather. It is Victorian; no older than 1890 but claiming a more ancient lineage within its closely printed columns of text. Despite the grand title, it is a book of spells.

“Maybe something to do with Halloween,” Lizzie suggests, coming to look at the book with him, though that was two days ago.

‘A spell to conjur a horse. On the night of a full moon take the still-warm heart of a rabbit. Light four candles at each cardinal point of the compass, let them be wax not tallow, place the heart within. Burn a sprig of thyme and drink a measure of Madeira-wine. Mark the floor thrice with words of power.’

The room shows no sign of this spell being attempted. No rabbit, no thyme, no candles. No horse for that matter.

‘A spell to summon a demon. The invocation is performed in a magical circle and commences in the east. Mark the symbol of your demon on the ground. Name your demon. Collect the blood of a sacrificed animal in a copper bowl and bid your subject appear in the name of God using the incantation here described. Command it to manifest in the form of a goat or other animal of your choosing.’

The book has been compiled by a gentleman collector from much older sources. He occasionally complains about these medieval sorcerers in the footnotes; of the obscurity of their instructions, of their deplorable Latin. He appears unconcerned at the possibility of the gates of hell being flung wide.

James turns the pages. There are spells to treat demonic possession, to induce nightmares, to locate your loved one in the next life, to recover stolen goods. No distinction is made between medicine and magic. Angels are as tangible as the vertigo, gout, cramps, trembling of the heart and ruptures of the bones they might be called upon to treat. What would they have called sepsis, he wonders? Blackened blood? Burning blood? What would be the magical remedy? He makes himself stop looking.

The pathologist, a colleague of Laura’s, arrives. She asks after Lewis but doesn’t push for details. She makes a careful visual examination of the youth, touching the body only once to better examine his arm.

“Preliminary view; self-inflicted,” she says, crouching to look at the knife. “With this.” 

It can’t be anything other than self-inflicted. The door was wedged shut from the inside and the room is too high for the window to have been used as an escape route. Assuming no manifesting demons, Charlie was alone.

The knife with its ornately carved handle indicates planning but it could, James supposes, have been an accident; a ritual gone wrong rather than suicide. He examines the book for spells involving knives. One way or another they all do. Blood fuels dark arts and medieval magic is unflinching. Blood is the harvest of sacrifice, it is currency and allegiance, it is life force.

“Love is -,” Lizzie tilts her head to read the words of a tattoo now visible on Charlie’s arm since the pathologist handled the body. “Love is a binding force.”

“Love is a binding force, by which another is joined to me and cherished by myself,” James says, completing the quote. “Aquinas.”

She gives him a patient look she learnt from Lewis.

“He’s a thirteenth century saint, theologian and philosopher.”

“Oh. Well, Charlie was a theology student so that makes sense.”

James doubts that Thomas Aquinas would have been impressed with the tattoo, he certainly wouldn’t have approved of the witchcraft and he had pages on the evil of taking one’s own life. He did, however, advocate reason as a means to obtaining true knowledge of God. James can see how this philosophy might appeal to someone with the sort of mind who likes to put a theory to the test, even if it means ambushing the Archangel Gabriel.

The body is moved by attendants from the morgue, revealing as it shifts, a piece of folded paper in the pocket of the boy’s jeans.

Lizzie retrieves it and opens it out. They are hoping for a note, but the page is blank apart from one word. ‘Faith.’ 

“Considering his subject was theology, it could have been an issue.”

“I don’t know where you get that idea,” he says and she rolls her eyes.

They are a sensitive bunch, it’s true. James has wrestled with his own demons over the years. He doesn’t need any spells to summon them, they appear at will to upturn his life. He thinks he has come to rational terms with them, he thinks he has made a bloodless pact, but here he is now, no better than a desperate Dark Age hedge witch sending up prayers and bargaining with God.

A burst appendix followed by sepsis. An infection of the blood so severe antibiotics might be unequal to the fight. It seems an archaic concern, something that should have been left behind in a less advanced century but blood is life force, blood is currency and James gave up googling and started praying when it got too terrifying.

It should never have got this far but Lewis, working on a double murder, must have been stubbornly ignoring the pain in his side for days. Laura, as usual avoiding Oxford over Halloween, had been away at a conference while James, on a case with the drug squad, was temporarily based at a different station. Which meant neither of them was around to nag him to the doctor.

‘A spell to return a loved one to you. When the crescent moon reigns in the heavens make a potion of rosebuds and spikenard in wine. Cast a circle and place something of theirs inside; a lock of hair, a glove or other item they have worn or possessed. Address the spell to one of the archangels of the four winds.’

James imagines the intoxicating scent of roses and herbs in simmering wine. He makes the spell; chalking the circle in his imagination, placing in it the tie Lewis left behind in his flat on the morning after the Reuben Beattie case came to an end. The tie is a confection, an underwater dance of translucent microscopic life, never returned, never asked for but carefully kept. 

‘I beseech thee Michael, archangel of the south. I command thee fire, air, earth, water and spirit. My heart is a fledgling fallen from the nest, hear its cry. Let him return, let him take wing and fly, let not ocean, nor desert, nor unfriendly spirit hinder him.’

“Sir?” Lizzie seems to have been trying and failing to catch his attention and now inspects him critically. “If you want to get back to the hospital I can finish here. We’re not looking for anyone else, are we?”

“I’m fine. Let’s get a look at his room.”

A porter takes them across the quad to a room in a block of residential accommodation. He unlocks the door for them and steps back.

The smell of rotting fruit and sour air greets them. The room has been boycotted by domestic staff and it is easy to see why. Apart from the remains of ancient meals, bottles of vodka and piles of clothes, they find alchemical equipment of uncertain purpose, evil-smelling concoctions, a sword in the wardrobe, a chalice. On cascading piles of paper there are occult diagrams and notes in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and frantic, sprawling English. A dozen books are open face down on the floor; Crowley, John Dee, modern editions of sixteenth century grimoires. The room makes James’ skin crawl; it is a room of things crouching in shadows and calling out in the night, of flapping wings and gripping talons. 

“Look at this.”

Lizzie has come up with an article clipped from a student newspaper. They roll their eyes at their assumptions. Faith O’Connor was another theology undergraduate. She died only a couple of months ago from a hereditary heart defect. The brief obituary includes a picture of a fair haired girl with a thoughtful smile. More images of this same girl with Charlie are tacked to his wall.

Charlie has been working on bringing Faith back, James supposes. In these papers they will find spells to communicate with the dead, perhaps even to raise them. There will be details of clairvoyants and mediums. He thinks of the unnerving truths told by Ursula Van Tessel. He thinks of Reuben Beattie’s cold rationalism as he experimented with the grief of people like Charlie.

He finds his mind drifting again, to Lewis, to that case and its consequences. The pull to be near him is almost a physical ache but he makes himself focus, makes himself stay. If he goes to the hospital Laura will try to give up her space beside the bed to him. She has been trying since this nightmare began to share the precious allocation of time. As if she knows. Of course she knows. But Lewis made his choice, and if he had to choose one person to be there when he wakes it would be her.

For a brief moment, things had been different. After Reuben Beattie was killed, after Vicki Walmsley died begging him to pray with her, when he could find not a single word of comfort for her, after he had almost died himself, when he had despaired of ever finding meaning in a life choking with murder.

They had surrendered to each other. Lewis had taken him home and taken him to bed and James had held that beloved body in his arms. It had been a moment when the world had rested from its labours and ceased its spinning, a moment when there was finally peace.

Followed by panic and flight. Name your demon. Guilt, cowardice, the shredded remnants of his faith. They flung him half way across Europe to Pristina and conspired to ensure he sabotaged any chance of happiness. By the time he realised his mistake, Lewis had bolted in the other direction, into Laura’s arms.

He looks at his phone, at the picture he took of A Study in Magic and swipes through it.

‘A spell to locate your loved one in the next life. Write down her name and keep the paper. Bind a lock of her hair and a lock of yours to a falcon’s feather. Go to a high place. Go by the morning star. Let the high place be open to the air so that your soul can fly, speak the incantation, release the bound hair and feather. Spill your blood.’

“He went to find her,” he says, showing Lizzie the spell. “When all else failed.”

“Poor little sod.”

They speak to Charlie’s friends and tutors, and to his parents who travel from Stafford as soon as they get the news. All they learn confirms their sad little theory and they close the case. He leaves Lizzie with the paperwork and by the time he gets to the hospital it is after seven. 

Lewis is no better. James knew this already from the messages Laura has sent throughout the day, but now he sees for himself. He is struggling to breathe, fighting the same worsening fever, unable to fully wake.

Lyn has gone back to Lewis’ flat for a break but Laura has been here all day. She is starting to look unwell herself and, after a brief argument, James calls one of her colleagues from the morgue to take her home for a few hours.

He finds talking to Lewis calms him, makes him less likely to move and displace the drip feeding him antibiotics and fluids. He talks on about nothing very much, trying to avoid the subject of work but somehow telling him about today’s case. He imagines him shaking his head at the waste of such a young life, his scathing comments about all the associated mumbo jumbo from Aquinas onward.

James has always envied Lewis his rationality, his clear view of all the things he could never straighten out in his own mind. Even now he wonders what has become of poor Charlie, of Faith. Even now he finds himself in firm possession of beliefs he simultaneously considers ridiculous. Magic is nonsense but who’s to say he hasn’t, in his fervour, whispered the right words and dispatched an archangel with access to celestial antibiotics, to intercede on Lewis’ behalf.

For all their church’s contempt, the people have always been pagan at heart. They touch wood and see dead people, they believe good or ill fortune can be harboured in objects or numbers or the confetti scatter of constellations. Half aware, they perform rituals to appease their household gods and goddesses and celebrate the wild magic of the elements each time they flip a coin into a fountain. 

He might have been their priest, turning bread into flesh and wine into blood, bestowing blessings on their births, deaths and unions. Perhaps some of that priestly magic still lingers in him, enough for one last spell, one last command. What does it matter who hears him? Archangel or demon, God or the morning star. My heart is a fledgling fallen from the nest, hear its cry.

As the hours pass the sound of Lewis’ breathing changes. It is as if he is slipping under water, slipping away. The nurse who has been coming in to check on him says she will page the doctor and she will, she says, phone Laura and Lyn to tell them to come back in. James hardly knows how to go on breathing himself.

Unexpectedly, while they wait, Lewis opens his eyes, woken it seems by the exertion required to stay alive.

“What’re - you doing here?” He asks, his voice painfully rasping. “Did something - go wrong?”

“You got an infection,” James tells him. “The doctor’s coming.”

“Hurts, James. Can’t breathe.”

“I know, just try to take it slow. We’ll tell the doctor when she gets here.”

He seems to slip back into unconsciousness, but then his eyes flicker open again. 

“Was Lyn here, Laura?”

“Yes, all day. They’re on their way in now,”

“Had a dream,” Lewis breathes. “About you calling me back from somewhere.” 

James takes his hand and presses it to his lips, “And here you are.” 

“This isn’t good. You don’t - have to pretend.”

“You can fight it,” James hears his own voice cracking. “We’ve just got to let the antibiotics work.”

Lewis struggles for a while, coming it seems, to his own conclusions on his fighting chance. He draws enough breath to carry on speaking, “Tell them goodbye for me, the kids, Laura. You’ll know - what to say.”

“Robbie, please, no.”

“And I’ve wanted to tell you something - for a long time.” 

“It’s all right. Tell me when you’re better.”

“I should have fought for you last year. Shouldn’t have let you disappear. I love Laura but you and I were always -.”

“Robbie.”

“My love. You deserved better.”

And that’s it, with the finality of an extinguishing candle flame, he’s gone. James holds his hand until the last warmth has gone from it, then he puts his head down on the bed and sobs.

~*~*~

When James wakes, the memory of Lewis’ death comes flooding back, devastating him all over again. He lies with his eyes closed, fighting against fully waking. This is a reality he wants no part of, one he cannot imagine how to face. Charlie had it right, he thinks. He knew.

Then, slowly, from the fog of pain a practical question arises. He doesn’t know where he is. He opens his eyes and is immediately disoriented. He is in bed looking at a ceiling he doesn’t recognise. Has he passed out or done something equally embarrassing? But no, this isn’t the hospital.

He sits up and looks around. It is dark but he sees it is Lewis’ bedroom and he has been sleeping in Lewis’ bed. He is wearing his own usual sleep wear, a T-shirt and shorts, but he has no memory of how he got here, he has no explanation. The need to solve the mystery overwhelms even the grief.

But then he starts to realise. No. He starts to remember. He is presented with a clear picture of Lewis making a space for his clothes in his wardrobe on the day he moved in. Feeling foolish, he gets up and opens the wardrobe door. And, impossibly, there they are. His suits hanging next to Lewis’ suits; a neatly pressed procession of Detective Inspectors.

Memories crowd in now. After the Reuben Beattie case, after that first night, he had tried to run, to set off on his well-trodden path to self-destruction, but Lewis, with an intensity surprising to them both, held fast to him. He relives in vividly experienced moments a year of surprised contentment. He has his promotion and Lewis has reduced his hours but they are – is it possible? - together. He looks for the first time at the bed he has been sleeping in. The pillow next to his remembers the shape of a head, the duvet on that side is pulled back, disturbed not long ago by a second occupant. 

A haunting series of images intrude. An orphanage in Kosovo, a lonely walk in blistering heat, holding Jack’s hand beside Lewis’ grave. If these are not memories, what are they? Chapters in a long, tediously detailed dream, anxious imaginings from some dark vault in his sub-conscious. Neither of these explanations convince. And now those images, so clear and vivid a moment ago, are melting away into a half-remembered nightmare of losing Lewis for good. 

He finds him at the kitchen table, dressed for the day. It is a now familiar and cherished sight; tea, toast and the Today Programme.

“Hello, love,” Lewis says. “I thought you were going in late.”

James finds himself falling on to his knees and wrapping his arms around him. 

Lewis rests his hand on James’ head, “What’s the matter? Is everything all right?”

“Of course it is. It’s better than that.” 

His head against Lewis’ chest, he lets himself be carried for a time on the calm seas of his breathing.

“Come on, pet, what’s up?”

“Can’t I just hug you?”

“Have the drug squad been at the evidence room again?”

But immune by now to all forms of eccentricity, Lewis lets James hold him without further comment, occasionally stroking his hair. When James is at last ready to detach himself he sits back and looks at him properly. He sees he is fully and brilliantly alive but not actually looking all that well.

“Are you ill?” He demands.

“No, just a bit under the weather.”

James gets to his feet and sees something he failed to register before. It is the bag of sweets Lewis normally gets in at Halloween for the neighbourhood trick-or-treaters.

“Wait, what day is it?” He asks, though he knows because that spark of memory has flickered on as well. “It’s Halloween. You’re sick. We’re going to A&E.”

“What for? I’ve just got a gut ache.”

“Don’t argue, just trust me.”

Lewis looks carefully at him. “What’s going on?”

“It’s your appendix. Don’t ask me how I know.” He pauses. “Because I haven’t a clue. But if you don’t let me drive you I’m calling an ambulance.”

“As much fun as that all sounds, I’ve got two dead bodies waiting for me in the morgue.”

“Nope, sorry, I’m not letting you anywhere near the morgue.”

~*~*~

In the end, he has to accept, they all have to accept, he has had a memory of something yet to happen, a memory that has since faded. But it doesn’t matter, Lewis has had a routine operation and is coming home tomorrow. Nothing else matters.

But James lies awake anyway. He is unable to sleep, not because he is concerned about Lewis, he’s not, but because something else is nagging at him. It is something potentially so terrible he cannot ignore it. But what it actually is, he has no idea. Is this how it will be now? Vague premonitions keeping him up at night. Laura has already told him he ought to get himself a crystal ball and tell fortunes at the police fête. 

If he does nothing someone will die. This he knows. This impending death is speaking to him as Lewis’ appendix spoke to him, in the same clear warning tone. But whose death? And what is he supposed to do? Carlyle College. Why is he thinking of Carlyle College?

It is a clear night with a harsh wind blowing. The wind has chased the clouds away and the morning star and the crescent moon are both bright in the sky. He sighs, he has no idea why this should be significant.

Morning star or no, it is only his Inspector’s badge that gets him past the Porter’s Lodge at such an hour. He follows some internal GPS to a tower, dense with flourishing ivy and he stands at its foot trying to make sense of the bound bundle of human hair and feather he finds there.

“Now what’s going on?” The porter asks looking up. 

In the top most room, there is a light on and a window open. James breaks into a run.

Though he has never been here before, he knows he will find a reading room at the top of a flight of stairs. He also knows the noise he can hear as he reaches it is the sound of someone barricading shut the door with a chair. He even knows the chair is upholstered in green leather and the table in the middle of the room is made of fine, old oak and has a glass top to protect its surface from the elbows and biros of generations of undergraduates.

He is in time to push open the door. A male student staggers back against the table. He is a child really, a first or second year; unkempt and hungry eyed in loosely hanging black jeans and t-shirt. On the table is a leather-bound book weighted open by a nasty looking dagger. 

“Who are you?” The boy demands.

James is not sure he has an answer for him. He slides the book over so he can look at it. A magic book. Oh, well, of course. ‘A spell to summon a demon’. He flings the boy a suspicious look.

“Did you summon me?”

The boy seems appalled by the idea.

The porter who has followed James up arrives breathlessly demanding an explanation for the window which is supposed to be sealed shut to keep the numbers of plummeting students to a minimum. Then he demands an explanation for the knife. The boy goes grey and sinks into a chair, his hands covering his face. On his arm there is a quote from Aquinas. An Oxford education clearly not going to waste.

“Does anyone know what’s going on?” James asks.

No one does or is prepared to admit it. 

The boy drops his hands to his lap, “Have you got any cigarettes?”

James locks the knife in the boot of his car and confiscates the book. Then he, the boy whose name is Charlie and the porter, whose name is Mike smoke a cigarette, making a companionable triangle against the wind.

In the Porters Lodge, Mike puts a brew on. With kettle, teabags and semi-skimmed milk he mixes his magic potion and speaks with fondness of a girl called Faith; a student who was close, it seems, to Charlie before she died. Charlie slips off his chair to sit like a child, cross legged on the floor in front of Mike’s electric fire.

Under James’ hand the book breathes and lives. He turns its pages, knowing without knowing which spell, which horror, was waking and opening wide its hungry jaw in the little tower room. He considers delivering a lecture on Aquinas and Natural Law to put Charlie off trying anything so stupid again, but he doubts it would make a difference. Love is a binding force. The tattoo looks new; it is a statement of intent and the intention won’t be dented by one failure. 

His phone buzzes and there is a message from Lewis, addressing him as Nostradamus, which must have taken him ages to type. He is about to be discharged because his bed is needed and he’s asking for an early lift home. James replies he is on his way and will be bringing a friend. The solution to Charlie is Lewis, just as he is the solution to so many problems. If Charlie can speak to Lewis, if he can be heard by someone who understands and has survived grief then maybe he has a chance. 

The crackle of electrical charge in the air, the faint smell, like burning hair are signs, not of a malfunctioning heater, but quietly unnoticed, a spell completing.

Lewis has a number of magical powers; among them the power to soothe and heal the most tormented of souls. Feeling unexpectedly lightheaded, James texts Lewis to ask if he would like him to summon a magic horse. Apparently his Vauxhall will do fine. 

End

July 2015


End file.
